Troll and Gnome Character Selection Screen
The latest beta build fixed the bugs with the new character selection screens for gnomes and trolls, hopefully the revamped starting zones for both races and the more attractive creation screen will give us more gnomes to harass.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Tanks - Vengeance
Imagine the tooltip for Vengeance read "Your damage scales with the rest of your raid as if you wore dps gear instead of tanking gear." That's pretty much it.

Q: Why not just make it +threat?
A: Tanks tell us *constantly* that damage is fun and threat without damage is not fun. Devastate is a much more fun button than Sunder Armor.

Q: Why make me have to worry about threat?
A: Because it's part of your job. A fight where there is no real danger of losing threat means half those buttons on your bar don't do much.

Q: Why not make tanks wear dps gear?
A: A few reasons. The big one is that tanks care about survival so they want to gear for survival. The bear solution works okay, but I suspect if they had the choice, the druids would rather see us itemize bear leather (if we could solve all the skewed distribution problems that led us to the current goal in the first place).

Now, it would be awesome if tanks did consider dps stats more seriously, and maybe outside of the instagib environment of Lich King, they will. Back in the day, tanks at least have say swords and rings for +threat fights even if they didn't use them all the time.

Q: Why does Vengeance needs to fall off at all?
A: Because we want you to care about actually hitting your buttons. You should be good at threat because you know when to use a Shield Slam for burst threat, not because of a nearly-passive aura that makes stuff stick to you like glue. If we wanted Vengeance to solve every problem of tanking, we would just make Defensive Stance et al. give you a 1000% threat modifier such that you'd never have problems.

Q: But if Vengeance falls off, we'll wipe.
A: That's not the intent. You have Shield Slam and similar abilities. You have a lot of threat generating tools. Heck, you have Taunt much of the time.

Q: What is the role of Vengeance in PvP?
A: Hopefully irrelevant. If making it dispellable isn't sufficient, we'll simply turn it off.

Q: Why can't tanks do competitive damage in PvP?
A: Because they chose the tank role instead of the dps role. Tanking comes with enormous advantages that are helpful in PvP, such as being hard to kill, hard to control and having good control of your own. That will be even more useful in the Rated BGs of Cataclysm.

Q: [I don't like that design. I prefer a different design.]
A: Feedback like that is useful to a point, but understand that your feedback will be more valuable if it does align with our goals. Saying "I think tanks should do the same damage as dps specs," is fine feedback, but it's something we're unlikely to change.

Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)ProtectionPaladins were always the "Block first, ask questions later" tank class of TBC and Wrath. Yes warriors use shields too, but Holy Shield made us block far more than the other guy.
We're just not happy with the way Prot paladins have been playing in Lich King. If you've followed these forums for some time that should come as no surprise. It's difficult to do that without breaking some eggs / butchering some sacred cows / insert your own metaphor here. Now we don't want to lose what it is that attracted you to the class in the first place, but we do need some space to come up with something we think is fun. (Source)

Holy Power as a mechanic is far from a polished entity.
I would agree. It just went in a few weeks ago. But we have plenty of time before we ship. (Source)

TLDR: 1) Please rethink the Holy Power = Mitigation philosophy and work it into Holy Power = Burst Threat philosophy.
The problem with this is that survival tends to trump threat concerns for tanks much of the time, and that's a totally logical response to have given the encounters you're asked to tank. While there are some fights where burst threat matters, there are plenty that don't. Almost every fight involves the tank staying alive however. We didn't want to introduce this new mechanic which was supposed to add some interest to all three paladin trees, and then have Prot paladins fall back on just mashing buttons on cooldown the way they play today, at least on the fights where threat wasn't tight. (Source)

Something I noticed, may be old news.. but when you're disconnected from the beta realms due to "World server down" or whatever it says, there are two arrows, an up arrow and down arrow, just below the character selection list. Perhaps a hint that Blizzard are planning to introduce the much talked about "Buy a new character slot" system.

Focus
We implemented focus because hunters do not feel like a magic class to us. They aren't casting spells. They are shooting things with a ranged weapon

It also makes hunters now more like casters than .... hunters. I HATE the new focus thing because 75% of the time I am "casting" steady shot. Why didn't they just make aspect of the viper part of hawk instead, or something like they did with enhancement shaman. I have to say, this is the worst part of cataclysm by far, especially as ive played hunter for so long.

I love the recent changes, however, I hope next patch lowers XP reqs for lvl 83 (from 1.7m to 6.4m??), introduce proper Plate models for greens (they have the same models as mail) and finally itemize Stonecore. Also resolving bugs that have been there for what? 1 month? Would be really cool than loosing time about trivial stuff as "OMG 5% block or 10% we are all dying here rite guyz?" no

Something I noticed, may be old news.. but when you're disconnected from the beta realms due to "World server down" or whatever it says, there are two arrows, an up arrow and down arrow, just below the character selection list. Perhaps a hint that Blizzard are planning to introduce the much talked about "Buy a new character slot" system.

A blue poster stated a while ago that they were merely a feature for developers, who aren't restricted by the 10 character per realm limit.

I love the recent changes, however, I hope next patch lowers XP reqs for lvl 83 (from 1.7m to 6.4m??), introduce proper Plate models for greens (they have the same models as mail) and finally itemize Stonecore. Also resolving bugs that have been there for what? 1 month? Would be really cool than loosing time about trivial stuff as "OMG 5% block or 10% we are all dying here rite guyz?" no

Don't worry, Ghostcrawler is here to talk about those sort of things, and there are plenty of other guys at Blizzard to read the bug report threads/ingame tickets and patch them to the devs, so there's no "time lost" at all here

It also makes hunters now more like casters than .... hunters. I HATE the new focus thing because 75% of the time I am "casting" steady shot. Why didn't they just make aspect of the viper part of hawk instead, or something like they did with enhancement shaman. I have to say, this is the worst part of cataclysm by far, especially as ive played hunter for so long.

To everyone complaining about hunters and focus... your only valid argument is that you have to SS 2 times in order to Arcane Shot once... who cares? All we do now is Chim Shot, Arc Shot, x Shot until we're out of instant shots, and we spam steady until one comes off cooldown... in Cata it's just a little different, you might SerpSting, Chim Shot, Steady, Arc, Steady, Steady, x... It's just taking away some of our massive burst damage and throwing SS/CobraS in as something we need to do between instant shots, not after we've blown them all...

Imo, focus is a great thing for hunters, it just sucks at low levels and it still has a lot of tuning to be done.

no you are wrong. there was a poll in the EU wow forums asking if they were to implement a feature to purchase more characters slots, would you be interested

Did you even read what you quoted?

And it wasn't a poll in the EU forums, it was a survey you could fill in that included the question. So before you tell someone they are wrong: a) Read what you are dismissing; b) Get your facts correct.